High-Tech Jacket Turns Video Gameplay into a Massage For a Friend

Oh your aching back—if only your significant other would throw the same zeal into working out those knots as he (or she) does dodging AK-47s in the latest iteration of Grand Theft Auto. (How many cars are there left to steal, anyway?) Avoid potential domestic altercations with the Massage Me, an electronics-embedded jacket that turns your back into a game controller.

PUT YOUR BACK INTO IT

With soft, flexible buttons that turn any gamer into your personal masseuse, the Massage Me is also an exercise in energy conservation—well, sorta—converting otherwise-wasted gamepad-pounding energy into a tension-releasing experience. “All you need to do is to sit or lay down in front of a video-game player,” according to designers Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson, “and you will be able to enjoy a back massage while the game lasts.”

The best massages come from playing games that require the player to press a lot of buttons and combinations.

Because the buttons register hand movements and interpret them before directing them onto the gaming console as control signals, Massage Me works with just about any existing game. (It’s currently hacked to a PlayStation controller but could be engineered to work with other consoles.)

“The best massages come from playing games that require the player to press a lot of buttons and combinations,” Satomi and Perner-Wilson note. Your mate about to shoot his way out of a drug sting? Two can play at that game.